In certain environments (e.g., a distributed programming environment), the response times of the application, or the overall throughput that the environment may process, may be dictated by the slowest part of that distributed environment. For instance, with Streams programming, the overall operator graph may be slowed down by the weakest link. This weakest link may be evidenced by the “backpressure” that exists, which may be effectively the queue of tuples waiting to be processed one-by-one by an operator.